Domesticating vigilantism in Africa, edited by Thomas G. Kirsch and Tilo Grätz, Oxford, James Currey, 2010, 190 pp., £40.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781847010285
This edited collection is a useful addition to the growing and increasingly sophisticated literature on vigilantism in Africa. Starting from the observation that the question of who is entitled to formulate legal principles, enact justice, police morality and sanction wrongdoings has become the subject of violent contestation on the continent, the book takes a broad approach to the phenomenon of vigilantism. Avoiding easy definitions that situate vigilantism in opposition to the state and the law, the book approaches vigilantism as an ever-evolving and contested social practice, enacted by diverse actors and taking diverse social forms. The result is an empirically rich collection, containing a wealth of information on the various and shifting forms of vigilante groups in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, and South Africa. As with so many edited volumes, however, there is little to tie the various contributions together into a coherent whole, and the chapters do not speak to the same theoretical concerns or address the same problematics. While this is not necessarily a weakness, it does mean that the volume's overall contribution to the study of vigilantism is left somewhat unarticulated.
Consisting of six case study chapters, an introduction by the editors, as well as a foreword by Ray Abrahams, the ‘doyen’ of vigilantism studies in Africa, the book provides for engaging reading. The introduction discusses many of the key theoretical issues that confront the study of vigilantism, including the challenge of defining the object of study. The introduction does a fine job of situating vigilantes not in opposition, but in relation to the state, and as such the book complements recent analyses that question the strict distinction between the public and the private and instead focus on the various practices and actors that bring the state into being.
The question of how vigilantes relate to the state is also a central theme in many of the case studies. For example, Lars Buur discusses the historically changing relationship between state agencies and South African vigilantes, concluding that vigilantism does not exist separately from political order and engagement with the state. The chapter is complemented by Thomas Kirch's analysis of community policing forums in South Africa, which illustrates the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship between democracy and vigilantism. Johannes Harnischfeger's account of two very different vigilante formations in Nigeria, the Oodua People's Congress in the south-west and the Islamic Hisba in the north, shows how these groups challenge the authority of the state while simultaneously being linked to various public actors and agencies.
Another key theme that emerges from the volume is the changing form of vigilante groups and their responsiveness to broader sociopolitical conditions. Tilo Grätz tells the story of a vigilante group in Benin that emerged in response to rising crime, and initially acquired popular legitimacy from its ability to deliver security, but as the group's violence escalated it took on the characteristics of a regional militia and was ultimately declared illegal. The shifting form of vigilantes is also illustrated by Sten Hagberg and Syna Outtara's contribution. Focusing on hunters in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire, their chapter shows how traditional associations evolved to become vigilantes and later rebels or mercenaries in the Ivorian civil war. Part of the explanation for this organisational shape shifting is the various economic opportunities afforded by the war. But vigilante groups also offer means of self-expression and identity formation, both for individuals and for the communities over which they claim moral authority. Applied to the Burkinabe and Ivorian hunters, this means that their reinvention of themselves in the context of the civil war can also be seen as way of reinventing and reasserting their subjectivity and agency in rapidly changing conditions.
This productive aspect of vigilantism is the focus of David Pratten's analysis of Annang vigilantes in southeast Nigeria. Vigilante activities, Pratten suggests, should be analysed not only with reference to external discourses such as rights, law or popular mobilisation, but also in terms of the ‘inside story’ of how vigilantes themselves understand their actions, identities and power relations. In this more messy world of local realities and personal biographies, vigilantism emerges both as a powerful mode of subject formation and as part of establishing the boundaries between community insiders and outsiders.